Kurdish is the language of the Kurdish people who live in the region known as Kurdistan, which includes parts of four countries Turkey, Iraq, Iran and Syria.

Kurdish is an Indo-European language, part of an enormous language family that includes many languages of the Indian sub-continent and most of the languages of Europe. Its branch of that family includes the other modern languages Persian, Pushtu and Balochi, but none of those are mutually intelligible. Kurdish is completely unrelated to Turkish and Arabic, though it includes some loanwords from those languages.

This phrase book is for the Kurmanji dialect which covers most of Bhadinan area of Iraqi Kurdistan and Kurdistan of southern Turkey.